Chronic City? Does it stay boring?

[Joe Allonby]

I didn't find it boring. The tiger thing turned out to be pretty cool.


On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 1:59 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> well I read on last night and the story itself seems to be kicking in, which
> makes the characters more palatable. I don't know if I could do better,
> maybe if I had started writing fiction 15 years ago , he's not exactly on
> unreachable terrain as a writer. Thanks for the feedback though I think I
> will finish it.
> On Aug 24, 2010, at 4:17 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:
>
>> CC was a little too sad a book for me, but nonetheless it has its merits:
>> good scenery, for one thing -
>> some jiggery-pokery with identities that isn't bad (alice's got me
>> thinking of every self-made johnny as gatsby now, so this kid from the
>> stix that becomes a punk hero for putting out his broadsides now is a
>> sort of gatsby
>>
>>   it's like, Chronic City he is saying there is some real western
>> canon that you can't just get into by writing broadsides and posting
>> them on telephone poles, and for his hubris in
>>
>>     trying, well, you shall see what his horrible fate is...he's
>> wracking his brain trying to make this great thesis...
>>
>>     Just like ole Fitzgerald was saying there is some kind of
>> eminence, great personhood, that you can't achieve by bootlegging
>> (personally I wouldn't frickin rule it out of hand completely...)
>>
>>      that is to say, is there anyone eminent whose means of achieving
>> it were more acceptable?)
>>                 (then there's the other identity spiel with the
>> narrator/actor guy which is halfway interesting, it's like he's
>> actually pretty bright but he is leaning for validation upon the nutty
>> dude,
>>                  and the nutty dude isn't up to the task, and
>> although the narrator guy has a plenitude of looks talent money from
>> which he could pay the nutty dude from whom he's receiving validation,
>>                    he never gets around to it, and the one time he
>> tries is disastrous and so forth, which sets up an interesting dynamic
>> but it just isn't fair to the nutty guy!  It's like, here's this
>> wonderful loony character
>>                     and he's subservient in the book to the point of
>> view of this .... ah well, getting into spoiler territory...)
>>
>> then you have the riff on consumerism...the chaldrons...which, umm,
>> take the place of "children" in these people's notional economies?
>>
>> the pot use isn't completely convincing, as you noted, Joseph...that
>> is, none of the sensuality around potsmoking comes thru at all: it's
>> all about the name of the particular brand of weed and how much it
>> cost...
>> (which is too close to some of the reasons why I don't smoke anymore
>> and haven't for a long time for me to really complain about it...)
>>
>> and the fate he reserves for the nutty dude is just altogether too
>> nasty for me to wholeheartedly endorse the book.  at least as a
>> pleasurable experience.
>>
>> But I'd say the same of Kafka, so what do I know?  The fates he sends
>> his characters on certainly aren't very nice...
>>
>> The nutty dude in CC is the only likeable character for me - certainly
>> not the narrator...not the girlfriend in space or the one on the
>> ground, not the mayor, not the dog...
>> ok, maybe the waitress in the burger joint - I liked her...
>>
>> yeh, not a bad book...I could sit here and pick it apart, I thought,
>> but then I realized that I can't prove I could do better... and that
>> there were a lot of good things about the book, the birds in the
>> opening and I think I remember the closing images as well...
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm halfway through Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City.  Is there any drama
>>> in
>>> this book? Does this get any better. I do like Oona because I know
>>> someone
>>> remarkably like her, but everyone seems kind of stuck and Lethem's plan
>>> for
>>> unsticking them has not shown up yet.. I also  read Fortress of Solitude,
>>> I
>>> liked the old R& B singer and his son . but everything else was pretty so
>>> so.  So far I think Lethem is overrated. He covers interesting terrain
>>> but
>>> so far the only plot I can find is on the book jacket.
>>> Another problem   The pot smoking central to Chronic  does not  produce
>>> thc
>>> like thoughts. The narrator saying they were really stoned is a shitty
>>> excuse for delving into and replicating the experience in a literary
>>> form.
>>> These are reflective and introspective people  and smoking weed should
>>> show
>>> itself more discernibly in their thought patterns.
>>>
>
>